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Holodomor

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Holodomor
Голодомор
Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933
CountrySoviet Union
LocationCentral and Eastern Ukraine
Period1932–1933
Total deaths7.5 million - 13 million.
Observations
ReliefForeign relief rejected by the Soviet state under Joseph Stalin. Respectively 176,200 and 325,000 tons of grains provided by the Soviet state as food and seed aids between February and July 1933.[1]

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор, "murder by hunger") was a man-made famine[2] that happened in Ukraine in 1932 and in 1933. It is also known as the Terror-Famine or Great Famine. At that time, Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union. Around 7,000,000 people died under the policies of Joseph Stalin.[2][3]

History

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Joseph Stalin was the leader and dictator of the Soviet Union, which was a communist country. He made farmers in the Soviet Union change the way they farmed; then he tried to make the farmers work harder for the government-owned farms, for less money.[4] Many people in Ukraine did not want to go along with this.

When Ukraine had a famine, Stalin refused to help the people there. Instead, the government took food away from people. It became illegal (against the law) to pick up food from the ground of fields.[5] The government also tried to stop people from moving around the country to look for food.

Legacy

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Scholars and politicians using Holodomor say the famine was a genocide because it was man-made.[6] Some compare it to the Holocaust because millions of people died.[6] They argue that the Soviet policies were an attack on the rise of Ukrainian nationalism and therefore is a genocide.[7][8]

Recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide by countries:
  Officially recognized as an act of genocide
  Officially condemned as an act of extermination
  Officially not recognized as an act of genocide
Poster by Ukrainian-Australian artist Leonid Denysenko to commemorate the Holodomor.

Other scholars say that the Holodomor was an unexpected consequence of the rapid and massive industrialization started by Stalin, which brought radical economic changes to the farmers and the country, and which was not done on purpose.[8][9][10]

Denial

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Since the 1930s, many Western scholars have denied the Holodomor for different reasons, mainly out of communist sympathy, which prevents them from recognizing the Holodomor and the worth of Ukrainians as equal humans. Such denial is considered essentially racist and dehumanizing.[11][12] Jurij Dobczansky, a senior Library of Congress cataloging specialist,[13] said:[14]

Holodomor denial [...] consists of especially vitriolic anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian tirades [...] accusations of foreign influence and Nazi sympathies, or ulterior motives.

Communist Party USA

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News of the Holodomor reached the US in 1933.[15] The Yiddish Jewish Daily Forward was one of the media that reported the Holodomor.[15] Shortly after, it was accused by the Soviet-funded[16] Communist Party USA (CPUSA) of "spreading Nazi-inspired lies",[15] despite the magazine being run by Jewish Americans.[15] Other Leftist parties,[15] with huge influence in Western academia,[17][18] teamed up with the CPUSA to smear Jewish activists who raised awareness about the Holodomor.[15] In recent years, the CPUSA and their academic allies[11][12] are said to have supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[19] Writing for The New Voice of Ukraine, Kyiv-based film critic Oleksandra Povoroznyk noted:[19]

Privileged Western anti-imperialists support the imperial brutal invasion of Ukraine [. ...] preach equality and resistance to oppression and yet accuse [...] feminist queer [...] of being Nazis because we don't want to kneel over and die in silence.

Walter Duranty

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Walter Duranty, a Moscow-based New York Times journalist in the 1930s, wrote a series of articles denying the Holodomor and praising Joseph Stalin, while millions of Ukrainians starved to death. The articles ironically won Duranty the 1932 Pulitzer Prize, which caused on-and-off controversy in the following decades. In 2003, the New York Times and Pulitzer Prize board reviewed Duranty's articles separately, yet declined to withdraw his prize.[20][21]

Oksana Piaseckyj, a Ukrainian-American activist who fled to the United States as a child in 1950, referred to Walter Duranty as "the personification of evil in journalism."[22] This case has become the biggest scandal in the history of the New York Times.[23]

Responses

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Ukraine

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Ukraine passed the Law On the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine [uk] in 2006 to ban Holodomor denial, recognizing it as an insult to the memory of victims and humiliation of the dignity of Ukrainians.[24]

Germany

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In November 2022, Germany recognized the Holodomor as a genocide,[25] while changing a law to ban the approval, denial, and "gross trivialization" of genocides or war crimes in the new paragraph 5 of section 130 of the German Penal Code, the Strafgesetzbuch.[26][27]

Images

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  • Passers-by ignore the corpse of a starved man on a street in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1932
    Passers-by ignore the corpse of a starved man on a street in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1932
  • Passers-by ignore corpses of starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1933
    Passers-by ignore corpses of starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1933
  • Children are digging up frozen potatoes in the field of a collective farm in Udachne village, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 1933
    Children are digging up frozen potatoes in the field of a collective farm in Udachne village, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 1933
  • "Light the candle" event at a Holodomor memorial in Kyiv, Ukraine
    "Light the candle" event at a Holodomor memorial in Kyiv, Ukraine
  • Memorial at the Andrushivka village cemetery, Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine
    Memorial at the Andrushivka village cemetery, Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine
  • Memorial in Poltava Oblast, Ukraine
    Memorial in Poltava Oblast, Ukraine
  • Holodomor Memorial in Windsor, Ontario, Canada
    Holodomor Memorial in Windsor, Ontario, Canada
  • Stamp of Ukraine of the year 1993.
    Stamp of Ukraine of the year 1993.
  • Viktor Yanukovych and Dmitry Medvedev at the Memorial to the Holodomor Victims in Kyiv, Ukraine
    Viktor Yanukovych and Dmitry Medvedev at the Memorial to the Holodomor Victims in Kyiv, Ukraine

Countries which officially recognize the Holodomor as genocide

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Map Countries which officially recognize the Holodomor as genocide

 Andorra,  Argentina,  Australia,  Belgium,  Brazil,  Bulgaria,  Canada,  Colombia,  Czech Republic,  Ecuador,
 Estonia,  France,  Georgia,  Germany,  Hungary,  Iceland,  Ireland,  Italy,  Latvia,
 Lithuania,  Mexico,  Moldova,  Paraguay,  Peru,  Poland,  Portugal,  Romania,  Slovakia,  Spain,  Ukraine,  United Kingdom,  United States,   Vatican City

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Other websites

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Holodomor.

References

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  1. ↑ Davies & Wheatcroft 2010, pp. 479–484.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1
    • Applebaum, Anne (September 16, 2024). "Holodomor | Facts, Definition, & Death Toll". Britannica. Retrieved October 30, 2024. Holodomor, man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933.
    • "Holodomor (Ukrainian Genocide)". The Genocide Education Project. Retrieved October 30, 2024.
    • "Common Lies about the Holodomor". Ukraïner. November 1, 2020. Retrieved October 30, 2024.
    • "Why Did So Many Ukrainians Die in the Soviet Great Famine?". Kellogg Insight. October 1, 2022. Retrieved October 30, 2024.
    • "Ukraine: This 96-year-old survived Soviet Holodomor famine". DW News. November 24, 2023. Retrieved October 30, 2024.
  3. ↑
  4. ↑ Young, Cathy (December 8, 2008). "Remember the Holodomor". The Weekly Standard. Archived from the original on January 5, 2012. Retrieved April 2, 2010.
  5. ↑ "Thanks to US for Holdomor Memorial". Cyber Cossack. Archived from the original on January 17, 2011. Retrieved April 2, 2010.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Zisels, Josef; Kharaz, Halyna (11 November 2007). "Will Holodomor receive the same status as the Holocaust?". "Maidan" Alliance. Archived from the original on 28 June 2007. Retrieved 21 July 2012.
  7. ↑
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Kulchytsky, Stanislav (6 March 2007). "Holodomor of 1932-33 as genocide: gaps in the evidential basis". Den. Retrieved 22 July 2012. Part 1 Archived 2007-10-20 at the Wayback Machine - Part 2 Archived 2009-10-15 at the Wayback Machine - Part 3 Archived 2012-10-25 at the Wayback Machine - Part 4 Archived 2012-10-25 at the Wayback Machine
  9. ↑ Wheatcroft 2001b, p. 885.
  10. ↑ 'Stalinism' was a collective responsibility. Kremlin papers, The News in Brief, University of Melbourne, 19 June 1998, Vol 7 No 22
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1
  13. ↑ Maloney, Wendi (December 7, 2022). "Jurij Dobczansky: Working with Libraries in Ukraine During War". Library of Congress. Retrieved March 16, 2025.
  14. ↑ Dobczansky, Jurij (2009). "Affirmation and Denial: Holodomor-related Resources Recently Acquired by the Library of Congress". Holodomor Studies. 1 (2 [Summer-Autumn 2009]): 155–164.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 Prown, Henry H. (March 2, 2025). "'Every rotten slander': Holodomor denial and the origins of the American popular front". Politics, Religion & Ideology. doi:10.1080/21567689.2025.2470722. Retrieved March 16, 2025.
  16. ↑ Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism, Yale University Press (1998); ISBN 0300071507.
  17. ↑
  18. ↑
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Povoroznyk, Oleksandra (August 2, 2022). "The paradox of the Western leftists". The New Voice of Ukraine. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
  20. ↑ "Statement on Walter Duranty's 1932 Prize". The Pulitzer Prizes. November 21, 2003. Retrieved November 4, 2024.
  21. ↑ "New York Times Statement About 1932 Pulitzer Prize Awarded to Walter Duranty". The New York Times. Retrieved November 4, 2024.
  22. ↑ "'The New York Times' can't shake the cloud over a 90-year-old Pulitzer Prize". NPR. May 8, 2022. Retrieved November 4, 2024.
  23. ↑
  24. ↑ Про Голодомор 1932-1933 років в Україні [On the Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine]. Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (in Ukrainian). Retrieved 2022-12-13.
  25. ↑ Sitnikova, Iryna (2022-11-30). Німеччина визнала Голодомор геноцидом українського народу [Germany recognized the Holodomor with the genocide of the Ukrainian people]. Hromadske. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  26. ↑ "Germany seeks to declare Ukraine's Holodomor a genocide". DW. 2022-11-25. Retrieved 2022-12-13.
  27. ↑ "Germany criminalizes denying war crimes, genocide". DW. 2022-11-25. Retrieved 2022-12-13.
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